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Callback – or the ability to offer customers the option of receiving a call back at a later time rather than waiting on hold – can benefit organizations and their customers in a variety of ways. And now businesses can enjoy the goodness of callback with less upfront investment and expedited implementation.

Given customers’ preference for callback over waiting on hold, and organizations’ ability to leverage callback to reduce abandon rates, and improve the customer experience and build loyalty in the process, electing to use callback is a no-brainer.

Waiting on hold is the No. 1 customer frustration. Customers choose the callback option 48 percent of the time. And callback reduces abandon rates by 50 percent. Callback also increases service level by 15 to 25 percent. Research shows that customers are 74 percent more likely to have a favorable opinion of a company after using callback.

Callback can also help organizations avoid the vicious cycle between less than ideal service levels and talk time – as service levels drop, average handle times climb. That’s because contact center agents tend to create break time for themselves by spending more time on the phone with each customer. And customers who wait on hold for a long time tend to take up more time with agents to voice their frustrations and elaborate in detail about anything they might be thinking so they don’t have to wait in another long queue in the future to express themselves. That creates a downward spiral in service levels on both sides of the equation. However, callback can turn that around and get service levels and talk times moving in the right directions.

Traditionally, businesses have implemented callback using a premises-based architecture. But Callback Cloud for Business from Virtual Hold Technology (News - Alert) now extends callback so organizations also have the option of embracing this functionality via cloud technology and the software-as-a-service model.

Callback Cloud for Business outfits organizations with simple callback services for API-based applications, SMS, mobile, voice, and the web. Because this solution doesn’t require new hardware or software at customer locations, businesses avoid the need for big upfront investments in gear and the significant costs and lengthy implementation times involved with complex integration.

Callback Cloud for Business implementation can be completed in one to three weeks vs. the lengthy time it can take to get a premises-based callback solution up and running. And Callback Cloud for Business offers many of the same benefits and features as Virtual Hold Technology’s premises-based callback solution. That includes abandon reduction, average speed of answer improvements, ASAP callback, multichannel callback, on-demand scalability, optimized workforce utilization, real-time control of customers’ end-to-end experiences, service level uplift, smoothing unwanted spikes in call center traffic volume, and a web-based client dashboard with real-time and historical reporting.

In addition to fast solution implementation, flexible billing models, and no upfront costs, cloud solutions also have the added benefit of allowing organizations to more easily extend enterprise applications and other resources to mobile workers, which is important given the growing prevalence of nomadic workers and smartphone use. The cloud can provide increased security and reliability because business data resides in a secure off-site location (or locations, in situations in which geo-redundancy is delivered) where network professionals and state-of-the-art systems do frequent data backups and monitoring. And the fact that cloud-based services are delivered by providers that already have significant data centers in place makes it easier and more affordable for organizations to leverage SaaS (News - Alert) options to scale as needed.

Callback Cloud for Business can be particularly helpful for small to mid-sized companies that are unable to fund a large up-front investment. As Gartner (News - Alert) notes in a March report, SMB organizations have aggressive plans to adopt cloud services in the next 12 months. The research and consulting firm says increased cloud usage by SMB organizations will help drive growth of 18 percent in public cloud services from 2013 through 2018.

But it’s not just SMBs that are embracing the cloud. Organizations of all sizes are leveraging cloud architectures and purchasing software-as-a-service offerings to lower costs, increase innovation, and improve their agility.

An array of high-profile companies are already enjoying the benefits of Virtual Hold Technology’s Callback Cloud for Business solution. Your company can too.